Monthly Archives: August 2007

There is another great article by Steven Milloy about the positive feedback built into the climate models that predict AGW. He makes the great point that if a slight warming cause a positive feedback resulting in greater warming, how come this wass not observed during the El Nino event of 97-98? I have never seen a AGW proponent explain that.

Of course I have never heard an AGW proponent tell me what the falsifiable hypothesis is.

Now here’s a mashup to give you pause; a wood burning cooking device with a gasoline powered vehicle. It’s from Orange County Choppers and the back story and photo are here (via InstaPundit). As soon as I saw this, I knew it was time for another demotivator!

The object lesson is that sometimes you can integrate two best of breed solutions to create a combined solution that is better than the sum if it’s parts. And sometimes you just can’t.

I blogged about the Verisign PiP Identity Provider here. I mistakenly said that PiP couldn’t be used as a general purpose IdP for Managed Information cards. Gary Krall from Verisign set me straight. You can indeed do this. There is an option to create what they call an “Identity Card” which is a managed card that used PiP as the IdP. I tried it out at this Bandit site, but I got server errors on the SP side.

It seems that there are very few SPs supporting Self-issued Information Cards and even fewer that support Managed Cards. Can anyone point me to some public SPs that accept Managed Cards?

John Brignell of Number Watch skewers former NASA Scientist James Hansen. I don’t mean that Hansen no longer works for NASA, I mean that he is no longer a scientist. Brignell points this out:

The language seems more appropriate to a mad king, raving on a storm-tossed heath about the injustices visited upon him by his tormentors, than to a scientist dispassionately analysing experimental data. It is, however, worse than that. Not only does he predict the end of the world, but he also reserves the right to keep to himself the methods by which he deduces this from measurement data, quite contrary to scientific tradition. There is, indeed, disturbing evidence of continual meddling with data from the past. The abominated McIntyre, however, publishes all his data and programs, accepting manfully the flak when he is caught out in an error. Though the adjustment in question is small, like others that have been made, it just happens, by sheer coincidence of course, to be in the direction to favour the establishment theory. The metaphors Hansen employs might be high in drama, but they are low in appropriateness. In applying the intended insult of “Court Jester” to his opponents, he not only transgresses the normal courtesies of scientific discourse, but also reveals that he does not understand the function of the said courtier in mediaeval monarchies, thereby causing his insult to rebound as something of a compliment. The corny ad hominem about his adversaries being in the pay of evil industrialists is not only without any basis of evidence, but it reveals his wholly political motivation, and comes ill from one who is not only in receipt of a generous salary but has also received munificence from a politically active foundation (the so-called ketchup money).

What a contrast! On one hand we have the modest stillness and humility of the dedicated seeker after truth; on the other, the shrill cackle of the politico-religious demagogue. One can imagine the embarrassment felt by the real scientists and engineers in NASA at the antics of Hansen.

Hansen is quite right, however, in stating that the change brought about by the correction of his error is insignificant, but the fact is that all the numbers that muddy this debate are insignificant, including the purported warming over the last century. It is of no scientific importance that the warmest year of recent times might be 1934 and not, as we were so frequently told, 1998; just as it was of no significance when the ranking was the other way round. It is, however, of great political importance. It was a highly emotive point of propaganda, endlessly repeated, that the earth is warmer now than it has ever been. That it is not even true for recent times is a devastating blow to the alarmist cause, and only the docile acceptance of self-censorship in the media has prevented total collapse of the campaign in the public mind. The few right-wing demagogues that have taken it up are, to say the least, dubious as allies of science and its methods. Global warming is not only a multi-billion dollar industry; it is a religion and a vehicle for political enforcement. The interests involved are not going to abandon all that profit and power lightly; so dirty tricks must be expected. That a handful of individuals without funding can take on and expose such a ruthless industry, however, goes a little way to restoring ones faith in the human spirit.

You should read the whole thing. And NumberWatch is always worth reading for the heresy of real scientific reasoning. The current debate on global warming is much more about politics than science. Which is why I write about it so much.

Dave Kearns points to a product called Random Password Manager that can create random password for use for administrative accounts. It seems to be similar to the Secret Server product I blogged about here.

Dave talks about the use case of having the password management system give an IT administrator a clear text version of the password which the gets automatically reset to a new unknown value. This is a crude approximation of a OTP.

While this is a great idea, it is limited by the ability of the password management product’s ability to set the password directly on the specific system. For systems that use AD authentication (or other LDAP) this isn’t difficult. But for systems such as RACF, SAP, Siebel, etc, it’s very difficult for a vendor to maintain all the connectors.

If this kind of functionality gets popular, I would expect these companies to start to set up partnerships with the IdM companies that maintain connectors to all of these systems. Many of the IdM systems have SPML interfaces for invoking password changes on the managed systems.

Another aspect to this would be to integrate one of the Enterprise SSO products such as Passlogix vGo into the mix. The admin password could set in the ESS repository and replayed for the user without the user ever even seeing it.

[Full Disclosure: I am a SW Architect for the BMC Identity Management suite which does password management, although it does not support the kinds of functionality in these products. BMC currently has no partnership with Lieberman Software or Thycotic Software. BMC does have a reselling agreement with Passlogix]